The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential people in Physics,
#11451
Tokubei Kuroda
1886 - 1987 (101 years)
Tokubei Kuroda was a Japanese scientist and academic. He is best known as a pioneering taxonomist and malacologist specializing in Japanese marine and terrestrial Mollusca. Early life Kuroda was born at Fukura on the island of Awaji. He graduated middle school at 15, and was recruited as a houseboy by Yoichiro Hirase, a Kyoto dealer in poultry, seeds and aviculture products who had founded a side business trading in marine and land shells. While his employment initially included cleaning Hirase's large house and looking after his children by day, Hirase paid for Kuroda to attend night school...
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Marshal Henry Wrubel
1924 - 1968 (44 years)
Marshal Henry Wrubel was a child prodigy in music, an astrophysicist, and the first director of Indiana University's Research Computing Center. At age 11 Marshal Wrubel entered the Juilliard School to study piano. In 1944 he graduated from Juilliard and also graduated from CUNY with a B.A. in physics. After graduation, he served in the U. S. Army for two years and worked at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. After completing his military service Wrubel entered in 1946 the astrophysics doctoral program of the University of Chicago and received in 1949 his Ph.D. under Chandrasekhar. He spent...
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Vladimir Sukachev
1880 - 1967 (87 years)
Vladimir Nikolayevich Sukachev was a Russian geobotanist, engineer, geographer, and corresponding member and full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences. His wife was Henrietta Ippolitovna Poplavskaja.
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J. Hans D. Jensen
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranium Club, where he contributed to the separation of uranium isotopes. After the war, Jensen was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Institute for Advanced Study, University of California, Berkeley, Indiana University, and the California Institute of Technology.
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Willem de Sitter
1872 - 1934 (62 years)
Willem de Sitter was a Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer. Life and work Born in Sneek, de Sitter studied mathematics at the University of Groningen and then joined the Groningen astronomical laboratory. He worked at the Cape Observatory in South Africa . Then, in 1908, de Sitter was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Leiden University. He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1919 until his death.
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Norman Hilberry
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Norman Hilberry was an American physicist, best known as the director of the Argonne National Laboratory from 1956 to 1961. In December 1942 he was the man who stood ready with an axe to cut the scram line during the start up of Chicago Pile-1, the world's first nuclear reactor to achieve criticality.
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Bruno Thüring
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Bruno Jakob Thüring was a German physicist and astronomer. Thüring studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy at the University of Munich and received his doctorate in 1928, under Alexander Wilkens and Arnold Sommerfeld. Wilkens was a professor of astronomy and director of the Munich Observatory, which was part of the University. From 1928 to 1933, he was an assistant at the Munich Observatory. From 1934 to 1935, he was an assistant to Heinrich Vogt at the University of Heidelberg. Thüring completed his Habilitation there in 1935, whereupon he became an Observator at the Munich Observatory. In 1937, Thüring became a lecturer at the University of Munich.
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Henry A. Bumstead
1870 - 1920 (50 years)
Henry Andrews Bumstead was an American physicist who taught at Yale from 1897 to 1920. In 1918 he was scientific attache to the United States embassy in London. In 1920 he was Chairman of the National Research Council.
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Pierre Fatou
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Pierre Joseph Louis Fatou was a French mathematician and astronomer. He is known for major contributions to several branches of analysis. The Fatou lemma and the Fatou set are named after him. Biography
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Edward Fitzpatrick
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Edward Augustus Fitzpatrick was an American college administrator, author, editor, government official, military officer, and conscription expert. From 1929 to 1954, he served as president of Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was known for being one of the country's foremost experts on military draft policy during World War I and World War II.
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Rex Mortimer
1926 - 1979 (53 years)
Rex Alfred Mortimer was an Australian academic and expert on communism. Mortimer attended Melbourne High School and received a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Melbourne in 1947. He became a member of the Communist Party of Australia at the university and remained active until 1969. He completed a doctorate dissertation on the Communist Party of Indonesia at Monash University in 1971 under the guidance of Herbert Feith. Mortimer went on to become a faculty member of the University of Sydney before dying of cancer at Royal North Shore Hospital on New Year's Eve 1979. Peter Singer...
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Wu Youxun
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Wu Youxun , also known as Y. H. Woo, was a Chinese physicist. His courtesy name was Zhèngzhī . Biography Wu graduated from the Department of Physics of Nanjing Higher Normal School , and was later associated with the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University. He served as president of National Central University and Jiaotong University in Shanghai. When he was a graduate student at the University of Chicago he studied x-ray and electron scattering, and verified the Compton effect which gave Arthur Compton the Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Carlos Varsavsky
1933 - 1983 (50 years)
Carlos M. Varsavsky was an Argentine astrophysicist. Early life Varsavsky was born in Buenos Aires in 1933. After completing secondary studies in the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, he settled in the United States. In the US, Varsavsky graduated in physical engineering, in which he also obtained a master's degree from the University of Colorado. In 1959 he did his doctorate in astronomy at Harvard University. He was the younger brother of Argentinian mathematician and social scientist Oscar Varsavsky.
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Henrietta Hill Swope
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Henrietta Hill Swope was an American astronomer who studied variable stars. In particular, she measured the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid stars, which are bright variable stars whose periods of variability relate directly to their intrinsic luminosities. Their measured periods can therefore be related to their distances and used to measure the size of the Milky Way and distances to other galaxies.
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Aleksandr Mikhailov
1888 - 1983 (95 years)
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Mikhailov was an astronomer who was a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He worked at Pulkovo Observatory from 1947 to 1982. He was its director until 1964 and is credited with leading its post-war revival after the fall of Leningrad.
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Leland Cunningham
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Leland Erskin Cunningham was an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets. In a career spanning 50 years, he became an authority on orbit theory and on precise measurements of the orbits of comets, planets, satellites, and space probes. He was also an early authority on electronic digital computers and assisted in their construction and use in orbit calculations.
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Louis Dunoyer de Segonzac
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Louis Dominique Joseph Armand Dunoyer de Segonzac was a French physicist. He was awarded the Valz Prize by the French Academy of Sciences in 1929 for research on spirit levels and on photoelectric cells as applied to astronomy.
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Bohuslav Hostinský
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Bohuslav Hostinský was a Czechoslovak mathematician and theoretical physicist. Family His father Otakar Hostinský was a musicologist and professor of aesthetics at Charles University. Bohuslav Hostinský was the eldest of four siblings.
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Mildred Allen
1894 - 1990 (96 years)
Mildred Allen was an American physicist. Biography Early life and education Mildred Allen was born in Sharon, Massachusetts to MIT professor C. Frank Allen and Caroline Hadley Allen. She had one younger sister, Margaret Allen Anderson.
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Adolfas Jucys
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Adolfas Pranaitis Jucys was a Lithuanian theoretical physicist and mathematician, and inducted member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in 1953. He graduated from Kaunas University in 1931 and later worked with both creators of the self-consistent field method – Douglas Hartree in Manchester and Vladimir Fock in Leningrad . Adolfas Jucys created the scientific school of theoretical physics in Vilnius, was the head of the Department of Theoretical Physics at Vilnius University . He organized the first Institute of Physics and Mathematics in Lithuania and was its first director , and later...
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Martha Betz Shapley
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Martha Betz Shapley was an American astronomer known for her research on eclipsing binary stars. Early life Shapley was born on August 3, 1890, in Kansas City, Missouri, one of seven children of school music teacher Carl Betz and his wife. Her family were descendants of German immigrants, and her grandfather once told her that he had seen astronomer Caroline Herschel in the streets of Hanover in Germany. Her mother and two sisters became schoolteachers, and Shapley herself became a schoolteacher at age 15. Three years later, she began her studies at the University of Missouri, where she earn...
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Pyotr Lukirsky
1896 - 1954 (58 years)
Pyotr Ivanovich Lukirsky was a Soviet physicist who specialized in experimental physics in radiation and optics. He was a student of Abram Ioffe and became a fellow of the Physico-Technical Institute. He contributed to industrial developments as well as to crystallography and basic physics.
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Oscar P. Snyder
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Oscar Peter Snyder was a United States Army major general who served in the Army Medical Department as a Chief of the U.S. Army Dental Corps from 1954 to 1956. Biography World War I Oscar Peter Snyder was born to Emil and Anna Snyder on 6 January 1895 near Millersburg, Holmes County, Ohio. He attended the Orrsville public schools graduating in 1912. He entered The Ohio State University College of Dentistry and graduated with the degree of Doctor of Dental Surgery in June 1916. He was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Regular Army on 24 October 1916. He first served at Columbus Barracks...
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A. L. Narayan
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
Appadvedula Lakshmi Narayan, better known as A. L. Narayan BA, MA, D.Sc., F.I.P. was an Indian astrophysicist and was the first Indian Director of Kodaikanal Solar Observatory during between 1937 and 1946. He was born in 1887 to Shri Appadvedula Vyasulu and Smt. Mahalakshmi in the Mukkamala village of East Godavari District of Andhra Pradesh. He studied up to matriculation in the higher secondary school at Kothapeta. He developed keen interest in the study of Science and continued his studies in the Government Arts College, Rajahmundry. He passed the B.A. degree and did Postgraduation in Physics from the University of Madras in 1914.
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Antonino Lo Surdo
1880 - 1949 (69 years)
Antonino Lo Surdo was an Italian physicist. He was appointed as professor of physics at the Istituto di Fisica in Rome in 1919; upon the death of Orso Mario Corbino in 1937, he became the director. Lo Surdo studied terrestrial physics, including seismology and geophysics; the 1908 Messina earthquake caused the death of his parents and other close relatives, except his brother. He contributed to the foundation of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica under the auspices of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, when its president was Guglielmo Marconi.
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Eugene Gardner
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Milton Eugene Gardner was an American physicist who worked on radar systems at the Radiation Laboratory in Massachusetts. Early life He was born in Santa Cruz, California, but would have been born in China if his father, a missionary under the American Board of Missions, had not returned temporarily to the United States for safety during the Boxer Rebellion.
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Daniel Frost Comstock
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Daniel Frost Comstock was an American physicist and engineer. Biography Comstock attained a B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1904. He also studied in Berlin, Zürich, and Basel, where he attained his Ph.D. in 1906. At the University of Cambridge he studied under J. J. Thomson. Beginning in 1904 he was a member of the faculty at MIT in theoretical physics .
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Isaak Kikoin
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Isaak Konstantinovich Kikoin , , was a Soviet physicist of Lithuanian origin and an author of physics textbooks in Russian language who played an important role in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons.
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Harold Loukes
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Harold Loukes was a British academic in India and at the University of Oxford. Loukes was born in Ecclesall, Sheffield, Yorkshire. He was educated at the Central Secondary School in Sheffield before studying English at Jesus College, Oxford. He obtained a first-class degree in 1934 and then spent 10 years teaching at the University of Delhi and at the New School in Darjeeling, where he was headmaster. In 1945, he returned to Britain, teaching for four years before being appointed a lecturer in the Department of Education of the University of Oxford. In 1951, he was promoted to Reader in Education; he spent a total of 30 years in the department.
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Carlotta Maury
1874 - 1938 (64 years)
Carlotta Joaquina Maury was a geologist, stratigrapher, paleontologist, and was one of the first women to work as a professional scientist in the oil and gas industry. She worked as a palaeontologist within an oil company; she was a petroleum geologist at Royal Dutch Shell. Maury focused on Tertiary mollusks. Maury initially taught in universities after attending Cornell University finishing with a PhD in 1902, although she had trouble achieving a full-time position. However, she really wanted to pursue paleontological expeditions. Even though she went on to later be successful, there were still elements of difficulty in her early career, in some ways due to her gender.
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C. E. S. Phillips
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Major Charles Edmund Stanley Phillips OBE FIP FRSE was a 20th-century British physicist and radiologist. He was also a gifted amateur artist. One of the founders of the Institute of Physics in 1920, the Phillips Award is named in his honour.
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Edward Llewellyn-Thomas
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Edward Llewellyn-Thomas was an English scientist, university professor and, writing as Edward Llewellyn, a science fiction author. Llewellyn-Thomas published sixty scientific articles on psychology and eye movement over the course of his life. Active in the field of pharmacology, he took interest in the ethical development of biomedical science. His Douglas Convolution science fiction series concerns the breakdown of civilization after most of a generation is born sterile as a side effect of a widely used anti-cancer medication.
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Harriet Brooks
1876 - 1933 (57 years)
Harriet Brooks was the first Canadian female nuclear physicist. She is most famous for her research in radioactivity. She discovered atomic recoil, and transmutation of elements in radioactive decay. Ernest Rutherford, who guided her graduate work, regarded her as comparable to Marie Curie in the calibre of her aptitude. She was among the first persons to discover radon and to try to determine its atomic mass.
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Frank Scott Hogg
1904 - 1951 (47 years)
Frank Scott Hogg was a Canadian astronomer. Hogg was born in Preston, Ontario to Dr. James Scott Hogg and Ida Barberon. After earning an undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto, Hogg received the second doctorate in astronomy awarded at Harvard University in 1929 where he pioneered in the study of spectrophotometry of stars and of spectra of comets. His supervisor there was Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. During World War II, he developed a two-star sextant for air navigation. He was the head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Toronto and director of the David Dunlap Observatory from 1946 until his death.
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Hilding Faxén
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Olov Hilding Faxén was a Swedish physicist who was primarily active within mechanics. Faxén received his doctorate in 1921 at Uppsala University with the thesis Einwirkung der Gefässwände auf den Widerstand gegen die Bewegung einer kleinen Kugel in einer zähen Flüssigkeit . One of his contributions was to formulate Faxén's law, which is a correction to Stokes' law for the friction on spherical objects in a viscous fluid, valid in the case when the object moves close to a wall of the container. This was a problem previously treated by Carl Wilhelm Oseen and Horace Lamb , but incompletely solv...
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Benjamin Miessner
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Benjamin Franklin Miessner was an American radio engineer and inventor. He is most known for his electronic organ, electronic piano, and other musical instruments. He was the inventor of the Cat's whisker detector.
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Nicolás Cabrera
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Nicolás Cabrera , was a Spanish physicist who did important work on the theories of crystal growth and the oxidisation of metals. He was the son of another famous Spanish physicist Blas Cabrera and the father of American Physicist Blas Cabrera Navarro. He spent many years in exile during the Francoist State. He was Professor of the Department of physics in the University of Virginia, where he worked from 1952. He became known for his interests in engineering and material science. He founded the physics department and was a professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid , from 1971. He is considered to have given an impulse to the study of physics in Spain from the time of his return.
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Roderick Oliver Redman
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Roderick Oliver Redman FRS was Professor of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. Education Redman was born at Rodborough near Stroud, Gloucestershire and educated at Marling School and St John's College, Cambridge.
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Paul Neményi
1895 - 1952 (57 years)
Paul Felix Neményi was a Hungarian mathematician and physicist who specialized in continuum mechanics. He was known for using what he called the inverse or semi-inverse approach, which applied vector field analysis, to obtain numerous exact solutions of the nonlinear equations of gas dynamics, many of them representing rotational flows of nonuniform total energy. His work applied geometrical solutions to fluid dynamics. In continuum mechanics, "Neményi's theorem" proves that, given any net of isothermal curves, there exists a five parameter family of plane stress systems for which these cur...
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Albert Sauveur
1863 - 1939 (76 years)
Albert Sauveur was a Belgian-born American metallurgist. He founded the first metallographic laboratory in a university. Sauveur was born in Leuven, Belgium. He studied at the Athénée Royal in Brussels, then the School of Mines, Liège and graduated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1889. He remained in the United States thereafter, becoming a Professor of Metallurgy in 1905.
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Clarence Chant
1865 - 1956 (91 years)
Clarence Augustus Chant was a Canadian astronomer and physicist. Early life and education Chant was born in Hagerman's Corners, Canada West to Christopher Chant and Elizabeth Croft. In 1882 he attended Markham High School, where he demonstrated a mathematical ability. After graduation, he attended St. Catherines Collegiate Institute and York County Model School in Toronto. He left to work as an instructor in 1884, and taught at Maxwell, Osprey Township for the following three years.
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Alice Leigh-Smith
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Alice Leigh-Smith , born September 11, 1907, was a Croatian born nuclear physicist. She is best known for being the first woman in British history to receive a PhD in nuclear physics. Additionally, she is remembered for her pioneering research in cancer and for her attempts in the discovery of an elusive element, Element 85.
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Egon Schweidler
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Egon Schweidler, was an Austrian physicist. Biography He was born in 1873 as the son of the court and Gerichtsadvokaten Emil von Schweidler born in Vienna. After studying physics and mathematics, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation "On the internal friction of mercury and some Amalgamen" . He was assistant to Franz Exner.
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Leif Erland Andersson
1943 - 1979 (36 years)
Leif Erland Andersson was a Swedish astronomer. Early life Andersson had been a child prodigy who won the Swedish television quiz show 10.000-kronorsfrågan twice, the first time at age 16. From his late teen years, he was also a well-known science fiction fan in Sweden, who chaired the MalCon in 1966 in Malmö and took over editing the pioneering Swedish science fiction amateur journal, the Scandinavian Amateur Press Alliance after John-Henri Holmberg left the position some time after 1964.
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Paul Gruner
1869 - 1957 (88 years)
Franz Rudolf Paul Gruner was a Swiss physicist. Life He attended the gymnasium in Morges, the Free Gymnasium Bern, and passed the matura at another gymnasium in Bern. He studied at the universities of Bern, Strasbourg, and Zurich. The doctorate was awarded to him in 1893 under Heinrich Friedrich Weber in Zurich. From 1893 to 1903 he taught physics and mathematics at the Free Gymnasium Bern. In 1894 he was habilitated in physics and became Privatdozent, and in 1904 titular professor in Bern. From 1906 to 1913 he was professor extraordinarius, and eventually from 1913 to 1939 professor ordinarius for theoretical physics .
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Harald Schering
1880 - 1959 (79 years)
Harald Ernst Malmsten Schering was a German physicist born in Göttingen. He is best known for his work in high voltage electricity and the Schering Bridge used in electrical engineering. Schering was the son of Ernst Schering, mathematician at the Göttingen Observatory. His mother came from a family of Swedish academics who worked with Ernst to translate works from French and Italian. Harald grew up with his two siblings in Göttingen and studied physics at the University of Göttingen. In 1903 he worked at the Geophysical Institute and obtained a Ph.D. in 1904 under Eduard Riecke with work on the Elster-Geitel dispersal apparatus.
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Heinz Barwich
1911 - 1966 (55 years)
Heinz Barwich was a German nuclear physicist. He was deputy director of the Siemens Research Laboratory II in Berlin. At the close of World War II, he followed the decision of Gustav Hertz, to go to the Soviet Union for ten years to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project, for which he received the Stalin Prize. He was director of the Zentralinstitut für Kernforschung at Rossendorf near Dresden. For a few years he was director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Soviet Union. In 1964 he defected to the West.
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Maurice Curie
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Maurice Curie was a French physicist and professor of physics at the Sorbonne, at the Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology. Biography Maurice was the son of Jacques Curie and the nephew of Pierre Curie.
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Theodore Holstein
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
Theodore Holstein was an American theoretical physicist, specialized in solid-state physics and atomic physics. With Henry Primakoff in 1940 he introduced the Holstein-Primakoff transformation, of importantance for the theory of spin waves. Other significant papers included the polaron , infrared absorption of metals, a microscopic theory of the collision drag phenomenon by Brian Pippard, Bloch electrons in magnetic fields and his review on the transport properties in an electron-phonon gas. He corrected the Förster-Dexter theory of photoinduced energy transfer between molecules and found new mechanisms for energy transfer in disordered systems.
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Ernest Esclangon
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Ernest Benjamin Esclangon was a French astronomer and mathematician. Born in Mison, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in 1895 he started to study mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1898. Looking for some means of financial support while he completed his doctorate on quasi-periodic functions, he took a post at the Bordeaux Observatory, teaching some mathematics at the university.
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